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Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

degoogle.jmoore.dev

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Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#611

Post by dang »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #462
nickelpro wrote: post #61

Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to…

> I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing If you don't want to be, don't post here. Oh, don't like it? That's what you're telling to the people who are disagreeing with you. But it doesn't affect you right? In 7 years this is the first time I've ever seen an honest to god troll on HN. What a first.

Yikes, please don't post like this here. We ban accounts that do personal attacks, regardless of how wrong the other person is or how right you are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: please don't post flamewar comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24250511 either. It's really not what this site is for.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#612

Post by johnsea »

patrick451 wrote: post #604
pineaux wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use epic and edge when you can haves Firefox? My experience with Mozilla has always been great. It might be marginally slower than chrome, but I don't notice and they have great features and it's open source

I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.

You can disable app updates and avoid the update notification by using enterprice policies (sounds complicated but is just a policies.json file).

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#613

Post by pydry »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #607
pydry wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desir…

I both agree and disagree with you at the same time. Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it. If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it. When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark. However your local milkman can already have "a score" f…

>If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it.

Did you ask the Chinese citizens in Chongqing if they can "just ignore" their social score coz they're not in Beijing?

The answer may surprise.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#615

Post by stingrae »

zwkrt wrote: post #584
stingrae wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work there a couple years ago and honestly this seems a bit silly. People are at Google are pretty product focused. Sure you can go and use the items on this list. But I don't think they will be better. Google has spent a lot of time and money to make a set of best in industry tools and people use them as a result.

“People at google are pretty product focused” Oh so they just don’t think about it at all. To be product focused is just to do what your boss tells you to do. Sometimes the easiest way to go about things is just to fully embody one’s role as a cog with no agency.

no. everyone is trying to do the right thing for the users and do what it takes to make the best experiences.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#616

Post by fsflover »

stingrae wrote: post #615
zwkrt wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“People at google are pretty product focused” Oh so they just don’t think about it at all. To be product focused is just to do what your boss tells you to do. Sometimes the easiest way to go about things is just to fully embody one’s role as a cog with no agency.

no. everyone is trying to do the right thing for the users and do what it takes to make the best experiences.

Are tracking and ad targeting based on it (i.e. manipulation) also considered “the right thing for users”?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#617

Post by chris_f »

fiatjaf wrote: post #312
djeiasbsbo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use searx and it's great. There are a lot of instances as well, this site has a list: https://searx.space/ There even are some which are accessible over Tor.

I've been using https://www.runnaroo.com/ and it's very good, better than DuckDuckGo in almost everything. Sometimes I still fall back to Google but if that was becoming the norm on DDG, not anymore. Another thing that helps is configuring custom search engines on Firefox. For example, for me typing `gh something` in the address bar does a GitHub search directly and so on.

I'm the creator of Runnaroo. Thank you so much for the kind words! It made my day. I was having the same experience where I kept having to fall back to Google, so this was a very much a "scratch your own itch" project.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#618

Post by judge2020 »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #324
judge2020 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[not op] Given that Microsoft/Apple/etc. aren't mentioned, G Suite has no real alternative other than Zoho (Note: nextcloud doesn't do email, so it's arguably not a GSuite competitor). This list would be better titled 'free/open-source alternatives to Google products' since excluding the other big companies extends past "de-google" and more into "open source living", if that's a good term for it.

Microsoft is absolutely a GSuite competitor and has arguably been in the space longer. I moved most of my custom domain emails off Google some months back and onto Microsoft 365 and it's honestly a great experience.

Exactly, but this list makes it a point to not include other big tech companies.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#619

Post by Sebb767 »

jeffbee wrote: post #351
Sebb767 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? [...] the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox They're both for-profit US companies saving your data overseas, so yes, for your last point it doesn't matter much. However, there are two advantages: 1) You're giving your data to a company aiming to sell you storage space vs a company which tries to make…

> selfhosting surely is the superior solution. You go on to partly refute this, but not strongly enough. Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security. Unless you spend all of your time managing your personal storage solution, self-hosting will be far inferior in these respects, and probably also in cost if a true accounting of time is included.

> Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security.

I'd not go as far. You can have your setup behind a VPN on a high port, go for distributed storage (for example at your home and at your parents) and be rather secure with a stable, auto-updated distribution. Cold backups could be an encrypted blob in a cloud or a tape somewhere.

Now, of course this needs quite some upfront investment in time and money; without a solid setup, I fully agree that the cloud is superior (unless your prefer your data lost over read by the NSA).

Other than that, it mostly boils down to risk management: A third-party hacker might have an easier time with your network than Google or Dropbox, but being script-kiddie save is not that hard [0], so it needs to be someone with time and skill. TLAs can't simply subpoena your data, so it might be harder for them - unless your home network is setup badly [1] or they're willing to possibly burn a zero-day. Your day-to-day ad agency is not going to lay hands on your data. It really boils down to what aspect you optimize for; given the grandparent, I assumed it to be privacy and therefore selfhosting to be probably better. But I should've been clearer on that :)

[0] Yes, mistakes happen, but big corporations have also been hacked with trivial exploits, so let's call it even.

[1] This also poses a danger to your login data, though, so the Cloud security team does not help either.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#620

Post by the_other »

gonehome wrote: post #17

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…

Props. I did a very similar thing.

For me, google docs was the hook that made me create another account. Every volunteer project I go near uses them.

I tried creating aliases for the projects so that each product team could reference me by an email address that reflected the project. But after a year or two I had loads of these aliases and would accidentally open a doc for one project whilst logged in to gdocs as the identity for another project.

I now just have one identity for google. And I feel dirty.

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